Recently, some changes at work have me doing more WordPress work than I’ve ever done before. I am mainly helping a group within our division deploy the sites they are building for clients. After doing a few of these, I’m just stunned by how difficult it is to move a site from one domain to another.

Given how common it must be for WordPress developers to develop a site on one hostname, e.g. “dev.MYCLIENT.com” or “MYCLIENT.ourdevenvironment.com”, before moving it to its final destination, it’s really hard to believe how hard WordPress makes this.

A couple of times, I’ve found it necessary to know what version of google play services I’m dealing with. For example, when I was using a number of Titanium modules that were dependent on google play services, I had version conflicts. But Google Play Services versioning is a nightmare. This article tries to make sense of it all.

Note: this series of articles applies to CentOS 7; for CentOS 6, see this series.

CentOS (and of course, it’s upstream distro, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has an
extremely powerful, but somewhat poorly documented, tool for rapidly deploying machines
and managing their configuration: kickstart. Kickstart lets you build a custom
installation that can run hands-free. So not only is the installation quick and easy
for you, you can be confident that your machines are configured exactly the way you
want them to be.

I was very excited to see that the OpenELEC team had released version 4.0, based on
XBMC Gotham. I read a lot before attempting an upgrade, and I still had huge problems
with the upgrade from OpenELEC 3.2.

I recently had a need to display a “site tour” to point out important features to our users. I was happy to discover that there are some very easy-to-use libraries out there for this purpose. However, I found that each library was ultimately lacking at least one vital feature. I wish these authors would put their heads together and build the ultimate site tour.

I recently put together an XBMC system to replace an aging Apple TV (first gen). It was my interest in the Raspberry Pi that brought me to the idea of using XBMC, although ultimately, I did not end up going with a Raspberry Pi based system (I use one for other things around the house, but not the home theater).

I thought I’d share some of the decisions I made so others could benefit.

qooxtunes is a webinterface addon for XBMC. It leverages the powerful qooxdoo
framework to present the user with a RIA interface that emulates some of the
best features of iTunes for library management. It currently only supports
music, but it could be extended to handle video and photos.